Breathless TalesFor the Magazine Photo, My Stepmother Lined Up "Our Family" and Left Me Out of the Frame. The Photographer Lowered His Camera.
Gwen wanted the perfect picture of the family that ran the Bluewater Inn. She arranged her own children around my father and told me to stand by the porch. She had never read my mother's will.
The Photo Shoot
The magazine sent a photographer on a bright Saturday in June. Coastal Living New England was running a feature on the Bluewater Inn, the little white hotel on the rocks in Kennebunkport, Maine, that had been in my mother's family for four generations.
My mother had died when I was nine. My father remarried two years later. Gwen came with two children of her own, Mason and Madison, and a very clear idea of how things should look.
That morning, she had spent an hour arranging everyone on the front lawn. My father in the center, in a blue linen shirt. Gwen at his side. Mason and Madison in matching white, one on each side.
I was fourteen. I stood there in the yellow sundress my grandmother had sent me, waiting to be told where to go.
Gwen looked at me, then at the group, and smiled.
"Abby, sweetheart, why don't you stand over by the porch? Just for this one. It's a picture of our family. The magazine wants it clean."
Our family. She said it looking straight at her own kids.
My father looked at the ground. He didn't say anything. He never did.
The Photographer
The photographer was a man in his sixties with a gray ponytail and three cameras around his neck. His name was Douglas Ferrell, and he had been taking pictures on this coast for forty years.
He lowered his camera.
"I'm sorry," he said politely. "Which one of you is Abigail Morrow?"
I raised my hand from beside the porch.
He looked at me for a long moment, then at the inn behind me, then back at me.
"You have your mother's face," he said quietly. "I photographed her on this exact lawn on her wedding day. And on the day she took over the inn from her grandmother. She stood right there, by the porch, too."
Gwen laughed lightly. "That's lovely. Can we get the family shot now? We only have the light for an hour."
Douglas didn't raise his camera.
"Mrs. Morrow," he said, "the magazine asked me to photograph the owner of the Bluewater Inn. Who's the owner?"
The Will
Gwen opened her mouth to answer, then closed it.
The truth was something Gwen had never asked about, and my father had never explained. Before my mother died, she had written a will. I'd found a copy at my grandmother's house the summer before, in a box of old letters, and I'd read it three times.
The Bluewater Inn, the land and the building, had been left to me. Entirely. My father was named trustee until my eighteenth birthday, to manage it and draw a salary. He was to live there as long as he wished. But it was mine.
Gwen had spent five years redecorating the lobby, renaming the dining room after herself and telling every guest that she and my father "built this place up."
"It's my husband's inn," she said finally.
My father cleared his throat. It was the first time I'd heard his voice all morning.
"No, Gwen," he said. "It's Abby's."
The Picture They Printed
Gwen went pale. Mason and Madison stared at their mother. For a moment, nobody moved on that bright lawn.
Then Douglas Ferrell walked across the grass toward the porch.
"Would you mind," he asked me, "standing where your mother stood?"
So I did. By the white porch steps, in my grandmother's yellow dress, with the ocean behind me and the old wooden sign of the inn above my head.
He took one picture. Just one. Then he lowered the camera and smiled.
"That's the one," he said.
The Front Cover
The magazine came out in August. They didn't use the family photo. They used Douglas's picture of me by the porch, across two full pages, under a headline about four generations of women who had kept the Bluewater Inn alive.
Gwen didn't speak to me for a month.
My father, however, did something he hadn't done in five years. One night, after the dining room closed, he knocked on my door and sat on the end of my bed.
"I should have said it a long time ago," he said. "That morning. And every morning before it. I'm sorry, Abby."
He brought me a box from the attic. It held my mother's notebooks: recipes, guest lists, little drawings of the inn. On the first page she had written: For whoever loves this place next.
The original sign above the porch still says Bluewater Inn. But in the lobby, next to the front desk, there is now a framed magazine page.
Every guest who checks in asks who the girl in the yellow dress is.
My father always answers before I can.
"That's the owner."
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Fiction. Any resemblance to real persons or events is purely coincidental.
